A response to Marathon by JAMS
Written by Mary Paterson
It’s difficult, isn’t it? When you come out of a play or a performance or perhaps just a dark room, and you try to commit it to paper. I mean screen. I mean the essence. I mean what consists in the central premise, the thesis, the ending, and in all the bits in between.
Do you know what I mean?
Of course you don’t. I’ve said nothing at all. I’m describing, instead, a vague feeling. A vague, familiar feeling. So familiar that perhaps you do know what I mean after all. I’m writing about the texture of our lives. The grainy, pixelated blanket of experience in which we swaddle our delicate consciousnesses before we go to bed, when we wake up, on the way to and from paid employment, and all the bits in between.
At one point in Marathon, one of the performers reads out a list of all the browser windows she has open. Here, in her privately-curated digital space, publicity jostles with admin jostles with serious journalism about devastating international events.
Can we assume this is a familiar feeling?
The original marathon was an act of war. Or at least, an act that coincided with war (and I’m not sure I’m qualified to make a distinction). In 490 BC, a war was raging between Persia and Greece. The Greeks dispatched a soldier to run to Sparta to ask for help. Pheidippides, or Philippides (sources disagree) ran for 140 miles in just over one day. The Spartans helped; the battle was won; and soon after, the Athenians marched for 25 miles in full armour at high speed, to fight the Persians on another front. Two thousand years later, at the birth of the modern Olympics, a generation of classically educated men consulted their memories, conflated these events, and created ‘the marathon race’, which was formalized at 26.22 miles.
A marathon, in other words, is a type of fiction: a collective memory of an apocryphal event, repurposed for another time. But at the start of this performance called Marathon, it seems the performers might be trying to return to an authentic origin. They ask each other how it began. Was it like this? Like this? Like this? They make movements to imitate it, tapping their fingers over their bodies, elongating their mouths to emit strange sounds, looking pleadingly into each other’s faces to see if they can see it there.
What it is, where it can be found, and whether it’s even a good idea to look for it are the questions that course through the veins of this work: not so much unanswered as unanswerable; not so much life-long as life-giving. illuminated by its own urgency, Marathon performs this search as a structuring principle regardless of what ‘it’ might be. And this, indeed, is familiar. Haven’t we all been looking for it for as long as we can remember? Haven’t we all been searching for it since time began? Isn’t this longing for the authentic about the only thing you could say – authentically – that we really have in common?
The authentic may be an eternal desire, but it also has a particular hold in the age of the smartphone, the social media giant and the 24 hour news cycle: the age, in other words, of information overload. “In the modern industrial order,” writes the sociologist Scott Lash, “ideology—as a superstructure—functioned as a means to the end of the accumulation of industrial capital.” He means that information is put to work as and for the ideology of market growth. “But now, as [Umberto] Eco observes, information itself ‘becomes the merchandise.’” Unlike the ancient Greeks, whose embodied journeys conveyed facts about distant events, in 2018 we cross a terrain in which our (digital) footprints are both labour and capital. The manipulation of information is more important than the information itself.
At one point in Marathon, the borders of this terrain swing suddenly, wide open. One of the performers is playing drums to add a sound effect to a scene. The scene ends, but she carries on playing - displaying the convivial fictions of the theatre and undercutting them at the same time. Then she begins to notice the lights change – apparently, as a result of her drumming. She plays a bit more, watches colour patterns dance across the stage, and seems pleased at the coincidence. Then she shrugs, and moves on with the show.
It’s impossible, I think, from my seat in the audience, that her drums can suddenly have this effect. Or is it? How much do I really know about drums and lighting and the technical set up of a theatre? Is my rational explanation of how lights work grounded in anything more than belief? Didn’t I just see it happen in front of my eyes? Just who is in control here? Am I watching a play devised by these four performers: a world they construct, reveal and bring to a close? Or are we all suspended inside a cloud of multiple possibilities – choosing between equivalent bursts of information, with nothing to go on apart from articles of faith? How do we decide between science and fiction, fact and opinion, coincidences, stagecraft and acts of war?
Scott Lash was writing at the end of the last century – in 1999, when the online world was vastly less corporate, less accessible and less ubiquitous than it is today. I read his quote in a book called You Are Here: Art After the Internet, itself published more than two years before the revelations – still unresolved – that misinformation via social media is being used as a tool of hostile statecraft. Now we know the Russian government sets up false Twitter profiles to influence other country’s elections in its own economic interests, are Lash’s words incredibly prescient, or am I reading too much into them? Should I be using ideas from the last century to explain a networked world that was unimaginable back then? Am I controlling the lighting, in other words, or is the lighting controlling me?
In this way, Marathon is searingly relevant to the autumn of 2018, whilst also concerned with eternal human experience. Both a search for information and a search through information, it performs a journey that we cannot understand, so much as position ourselves within. And in this position, how can we be certain of anything? One scene is played over and over again, its actors changing their roles slightly each time. Each repetition is a version of the truth, as well as a (mis)representation of all the past truths we have already seen – not just those literally made visible in the performance, but also those referenced in the familiarity of its themes. Each revision gets closer to something and further away from something else. Information multiplies. Cause is informed by effect. Facts become fake news, and vice versa.
“The medium of the social is in constant flux, quasi- and pseudo-equilibrium,” writes the art historian Johanna Drucker, in an argument for a quantum theory of social relations, “and is the embodiment sine qua non of stochastic processes and complexity.” Drucker argues that while we have long accepted the physical world is, at its most intimate level, unpredictable, we still cling on to the idea that social relations cohere to a sort of linear sense. In fact, this misapprehension is what makes resistance to social norms impossible. “Avant-garde” art techniques, for example, tend to draw on tropes of disruption or shock, which makes them reactionary: they assume that stability is the natural state of our social world.
Perhaps this search for stability functions like the chimera of authentic truth we have all been looking for for so long. “Our desire for an explanation is nostalgic,” writes Drucker, on the impact of “the indeterminate unfolding” of information in an interconnected world. This unfolding is what makes Marathon so familiar, and so bittersweet. A borderless land in which meaning is negotiated but never explained, Marathon presents the nostalgia of desire but withholds a resolution. There is no moment of external truth here: at the play’s close, acceptance and spectacle combine in a way that is both heartbreakingly predictable and totally unforeseen. Instead, there is a crescendo of information that shows truth to be a fiction created by and for the people who pursue it.
This is why I have not described in detail the gentle layering of ideas in Marathon, the subtle repetitions, the blurred implications, the human comforts. I have not laid out its symbols and suggestions in language, a system of meaning that itself aspires to a logic it can never attain. To do that would be to miss the point – to yearn for a stability that the play imagines itself out of; to believe in an authenticity that it disavows. Instead, I have an irrational, non-linear anecdote:
When I was waiting for Marathon to start, I bumped into a friend who was watching it for the third time. He told me that there was a moment of extraordinary clarity in the play, which we should talk about afterwards. His words fringed my experience with anticipation and when I saw him later, I was sure he meant the moment with the drums. No. He was thinking of something else, entirely: a scene that I could barely remember. Somehow, we both felt the same about the show, but for different reasons. We had arrived at a common feeling, despite having very little in common.
This, of course, is part of the redemptive power of theatre: to experience your private feelings fully, and in company. Theatre is a social space that is can navigate meanings without having to satisfy a logic of production. Does it matter what we’re looking for, as long as we’re looking for something, together?
If there is such a thing as an expert, said the statistician David Speigelhalter in a recent radio interview, then she is the person who is least sure of her position. If there is such a thing as a marathon, it’s this: the memory of a journey whose details are lost, whose meaning is unclear, whose importance is vital.